Geraldine Golf Club named club of the year

By Neville Idour

Geraldine Golf Club, the home of the Denfield golf course, was a deserved winner of club of the year announced in Christchurch last month.

Chris Phillips, the business services development manager, described the path the club took to a position of growth and success.

Caption: An aerial view of Geraldine Golf Club course.

“A few of us got together and formed a steering committee to look at the short term, medium term, long term and how to structure a board. Richard Hudson came to give us a hand on how to change this around and I guess the important thing was to use Richard’s expertise with what he had seen elsewhere and then we went down the process of special general meetings and the constitution.

“It became very clear that if we were going to change Geraldine we had to have the whole of the club with us and if we didn’t do that we were going to have so many issues whereby we might have some great ideas, but if the board wasn’t necessarily going to support them it was going to be extremely difficult. So having got ourselves in that position and decided that we would put a board together I was one of those on the board. “

“Richard explained to us that those clubs that did make a difference, those ones that had come back from the brink of losing their whole club altogether were people who focussed on club services. He said this is what Geraldine needed to do in his view to make a difference otherwise you have all these ideas at board level but what’s happening down at the club has nothing to do with that.

“At that time I had done 40 years in education mostly as PE (physical education) teacher and for the last five years I was secretary and I sat there and thought “bloody hell, I could do that job, because it’s a real challenge and completely different to what I was doing before and to cut a long story short, I am here today. So once I started our chairman George Harper said to me whatever you are going to do Chris, it’s going to be something that you look through the lens and ask is it going to be something that will bring more money to the club.

“Before we did that my role was sort of put together with a job spec we were not really sure that this was the way to go and we weren’t even sure that my role was something that was necessary. Anyway 10 members put up $2000 each to pay my salary for the first year. I was incredibly humbled that people were prepared to do that. Other people then decided if that’s what these members are prepared to do then we need to listen to Chris, support him for a year and see where we are going to go.

“I didn’t have any great ideas about where I was going to go, I just thought I would turn up on the day – but it became clear that we needed to change the culture of the club, we needed to look at things in a much more positive way. We needed to think are we still losing money and where are we going to go? The first thing I started to look at was that we regularly had motorhomes staying in our car park and so I started to think about what was the experience like for not only people in motor homes but for everyone else who came to the club. I wanted their experience to be from when they walked through that gate all the way to the club, to when they played their golf and came into the bar and went home.

Caption: The clubhouse at Geraldine Golf Club.

“I knew that the only way we were going to make a difference was by word of mouth because we did have the money for that but not all those other things that would have taken away from the best advertising you can have. So that is the way that I decided to go about it and gradually over a period of time you could feel that little things that you did, started to change the whole feeling of positivity in the club.

“I went down the motorhome idea and a friend of mine suggested we run a tournament for the motorhome people. I thought maybe and then two weeks later it was Chris, what have you done about organising a motorhome tournament? So I thought I am going to have to do something about this so I got in touch with the person up in the North Island who ran something similar. The result, we put together the inaugural South Island Motorhome Tournament when I had 40 people who played. We ran it over three courses, Temuka, ourselves and Grande Vue in Geraldine.

“They had a ball of a time and again I thought, well, this is another way of getting people who camp in Motueka, Nelson, Invercargill and all over the place. They had said we’ve really enjoyed this, we will promote your club elsewhere and we will be back next year. It was another way of diversifying and trying to move forward. I have moved a little bit further with Richard coming along with different initiatives.

``It’s been a journey and to stand there yesterday to receive the award along with Will Polson our president has been quite humbling for me personally.”

“But I would just say that it just shows that if there are other clubs out there who are in our position there is hope if you have the positivity, desire and the inter-personal skills which are incredibly important in this role. We hope we can all move on from here.”